On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 05:02:09PM +0000, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
For me, coming from a mostly Java background (but with a healthy
dollop of functional programming thrown in the mix -- but no
Haskell), the phrase that unlocked monads was "programmable
semicolon".
I'm curious what "unlock" means here.
It's hard to be sure, as this was ~10 years ago, but I think it was about motivation for me. Specifically: why do we need more than one monad, IO. I understood that Haskell functions were pure, and thus could produce no side effects. So we needed to have *some* way of having a program interact with the world. This way was the set of functions that work in the IO monad. These operations need a way of interacting with pure code (i.e. `return`) and some way of sequencing (i.e. >>=). This was all clear enough. What I didn't understand is why there was a typeclass to capture this or why we needed other monads -- until I associated "monad" with "programmable semicolon". At that point, I realized that the idea is very powerful.
Richard
Do you mean you couldunderstand the definition of the monad class after coming across"programmable semicolon" but not before? Or do you mean youunderstood the *purpose* of monads, but not necessarily how one wouldgo about implementing them? Or something else?_______________________________________________Haskell-Cafe mailing listTo (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafeOnly members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.